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Akimi Yoshida Launches Utagawa Hyakkei Manga

The August issue of Shogakukan's Monthly Flowers magazine is revealing on Friday that Akimi Yoshida is launching a new manga titled Utagawa Hyakkei (One Hundred Views of Utagawa) in the magazine's next issue on July 26. The first chapter will have 56 pages including a color opening page, and it will be featured on the issue's front cover.

The manga's story centers on the people who live in a hot spring town in a valley. In particular, it focuses on Kazuki — the stepbrother of Suzu, one of the central characters of Yoshida's previous Umimachi Diary manga. The character appears in a Umimachi Diary side-story published last September. In that story [Highlight text to read the spoiler: set 10 years after Umimachi Diary, Suzu meets Kazuki and tells him that she has married Fūta.]

Akimi ended her Umimachi Diary manga in June 2018. Shogakukan published the 10th and final compiled book volume for the manga last December. The manga began serialization in Monthly Flowers in 2006. The manga was a nominee for the 11th Cultural Affairs Media, Art, & Manga Award, and it won the 2013 Manga Taisho (Cartoon Grand Prize) award.

The manga inspired a stage play, which ran from March through April 2017 in Tokyo.

The manga also inspired a 2015 live-action film by famed director Hirokazu Kore-eda that screened with English subtitles under the title Our Little Sister. The film won five awards, including Best Picture of the Year, at the 37th Annual Japan Academy Prizes in March 2016. Sony Pictures Classics released the film digitally and on home video in North America.

Yoshida's Banana Fish manga inspired a television anime that premiered in July 2018, and streamed on Amazon Prime Video. Viz Media is currently reprinting the manga.

Sources: Monthly Flowers August issue, Oricon News, Comic Natalie